Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway

Dancing in the dark. Leaping into the Void

I was twenty something. I had just broken up with her after 7 years. We first met late at night on the lawn of the Russian Consulate in Montreal and then a month after the Russian Consulate we were living together and I bought her the tiniest diamond ring at Hudson Bay promising to someday marry her. It was a relationship that survived a move in the dead of winter, the pipes frozen and a U-Haul trailer improperly hitched to the car throwing bright orange sparks back behind us on the blizzardy highway. It was a relationship that had survived an affair with a sailor, separations, a basement apartment, bad jobs, and new cities, and a few university degrees. And now it was the relationship that ended 7 years later in a new city, a clothes-drying rack splintered into a million pieces after she stayed out all night with someone who she kept saying was just a friend but that she ended up married with kids to, naming one of the kids after my brother. It was a hard breakup.

It was a hard time for me. I had a new job and new dog and my first apartment ever without roommates and it felt like my whole world had disintegrated and that I didn’t really understand what was taking its place. I was afraid of the dark. Afraid not about someone breaking into the apartment or ghosts or anything like that. I was afraid that when I went to bed and fell asleep that I would would be losing not just consciousness but all sense of self. A friend from work Melanie (still one of my favourite people from my old work life, and the person who would later introduce me to the mother of my children—I wonder if she is reading this? I wonder if she knows how significant she is?) gave me a big red enamel pot for cooking spaghetti as a housewarming present after hearing my breakup story while sharing the shuttle bus up to my new job in the suburbs. When I woke up, the first thing I saw was that big red pot on the shelf of my one-bedroom apartment.

That red pot felt like the most meaningful thing I had ever received because it felt normal, like a kind of home in some Italian way that I had never known but that felt grounded and when I woke up and saw it, I knew that I was in my own home. That helped. But the dark with its forever velvet void still scared me. I felt closer to death because my old-self-good-boyfriend-till-death-do-us-part was dead. In my new life I would need not just spaghetti but new friends that were only my friends. New music. A new place to walk with my new dog. And a new job that could pay rent for living on my own. Sometimes even after I started finding some of these things I felt vampire prone. Afraid that my self was not quite alive, awake at the wrong times, fundamentally alone. I was afraid that when I shut down in bed at night that I was shutting down absolutely. Or that when I woke up I would not be able to re-assemble myself that self being so loosened, so under-construction. Free but untethered. The fear would return.

I was hanging out a bunch with Leanne and Jason who had just started a publishing imprint and had this idea about a book full of people dancing with the lights off.